I decided to require people to sign up and login to read forum posts. You can still hide your online status in your profile if you choose to do so.

There is absolutely no correlation to this decision and the restoration of the database that occurred yesterday. I just happened to be in an admin frame of mind and with the demise of the official forum, I’d been mulling it over in order to hopefully gain participation from readers. Actually, if I had more time last night, I would have gone ahead and upgraded to the newer PHPBB 3.x. as this 2.x version is no longer supported.